In today’s IT ecosystems, you see a lot of development shops that want Automation and Continuous Integration (CI) and they want it NOW!
A common pitfall of Test Automation is setting unrealistic objectives. How often have you heard, “Let’s automate everything!”.
Interestingly, according to the state of Testing report 2019, 37% of respondents have between 10% and 50% coverage on functional test scenarios.
The three areas in which test automation is mostly used are regression testing, continuous integration/ continuous deployment, and unit testing.
Test Automation is not a silver bullet that will solve all your testing issues. It is a key practice to help companies speed up the development life cycle. Involving QA from requirements definition/ sprint planning to test execution will set you on the right path to successfully implementing Automation and CI.
Basic Continuous Integration cycle
There are many variations to the process, but the basic CI build cycle consists of these key steps:
- Developer commits changes to the source code repository
- Build server executes the master build script or delegates execution to another server
- Checks out source code
- Builds executable version of the application
- Runs other jobs, such as testing and code inspection
- The team is notified of build results through a feedback mechanism
- If alerts are generated, the team takes immediate action to correct problems
- If a code fix is needed, the developer commits the corrected code back to the repository; this action kicks off a new build cycle.
Continuous deployment is a culmination of practices and steps that enable a team to release working software any time, any place, with as little effort as possible.
You need a quality manual QA process before test automation, and a quality test automation framework before CI can be successfully implemented. Investing in the right QA roadmap will greatly increase your chances of successfully implementing an Automation/CI framework.
Benefits of Continuous Integration
Trying to convince your team it’s time for continuous integration?
We put together this infographic to show the benefits. There’s often some misunderstanding about how continuous delivery and continuous deployment work together. While continuous delivery is a software methodology that allows quality code to be produced rapidly with the goal of shipping new features, updates, and patches to customers more regularly, continuous deployment takes things further.
Each change that passes manual and automation tests is deployed to production automatically. Embracing development, version control, continuous integration, testing and automated deployments. Continuous deployment is a logical end goal for continuous delivery, but it’s an approach that won’t necessarily be suitable for all operations.
CelticQA solutions can ensure you have the right foundations in place so your QA function can evolve to include Automation and Continuous Integration. We help you navigate the pitfalls, minimize the time to value and maximize the velocity of output from these practices. We can be contacted at info@celticqa.com if you wish to discuss how we can be of service.
